Blue Marble - March 2009

Health alert: Spring and hayfever go together like, well, sex and sneezes. All those flowers. All that green grass. Kachew.

But, guys, you get a break on this one. A neurologist from Tabriz Medical University in Iran proposes that a well-timed ejaculation will clear your bunged nose. Too.

The logic goes like this: the nose and genitals are both connected to the sympathetic nervous system that controls certain reflexes. A blocked nose is caused by swollen and inflamed nasal blood vessels irritated by an infection or by pollen in the air. But during ejaculation the sympathetic nervous system constricts blood vessels across the body. That should soothe the swollen nasal blood vessels, freeing the airway for deep, er, that is, normal breathing.

Sina Zarrintan, the neurologist, says he hasn't actually tested this yet. Right, and the pope doesn't have wet dreams.

But if it works, whacking off could offer many advantages over decongestant drugs, which can cause hypertension and make congestion worse over the course of a few days, writes Zarrintan in Medical Hypotheses.

He suggests masturbating or having sex whenever the symptoms are bad enough to warrant another ejaculation. And when aren't they? The patient can adjust the number of intercourses or masturbations depending on the severity of the symptoms, he says. It's the best scrip of all: Take as needed.

Work this in with a little sneeze fetishism and it gets downright fun to be miserable in the spring—if you're a guy, that is. Global warming gets some much-needed kink.

Sandra Giustina is a 61-year-old uninsured American. For three years she saved her money in hopes of affording heart surgery to correct her atrial fibrillation. "They [US hospitals] told me it would be about $175,000, and there was just no way could I come up with that," Giustina said.

So, with a little digging online, she found several high quality hospitals vying for her business.... Within a month, she was on a plane from her home in Las Vegas, Nevada, to New Delhi, India. Surgeons at Max Hospital fixed her heart for "under $10,000 total, including travel."

How do they do it? With wacky ideas like these one: "Max neurosurgeon Dr. Ajaya Jha said the hospital can provide high-quality care at low prices because the staff work hard to cut waste.

"I've seen hospitals in the US where they open up something costing $10,000 and say, 'Oh it's not working. OK, give me another one.' We would never do that here. Even for 100 rupees (about $2) -- we would say, "Do we need to open this suture? Do we need to open this gauze?' We are very conscious of cost."

The salary of a US surgeon is five times that of a surgeon in India. "We [surgeons in India] want to make a profit, but we don't want to profiteer. We don't want squeeze people and I think American industries should also think that way," Jha said.

Adding 2-percent fish oil in the diet of cattle reduces the amount of methane emissions out their back ends. The benefits of omega-3 fatty acids are legendary and probably inflated but in this case the effect seems positively deflationary.

According to Lorraine Lillis, speaking at the Society for General Microbiology in the UK: "The fish oil affects the methane-producing bacteria in the rumen part of the cow's gut, leading to reduced emissions. Understanding which microbial species are particularly influenced by changes in diet and relating them to methane production could bring about a more targeted approach to reducing methane emissions in animals."

Target away, Doctor Lillis.

Cattle, sheep, and goats fart and burp about 900 billion tons of methane a year, more than a third of total global emissions. The problem comes from the methanogen bacteria inside the guts of ruminants. These helpful bacteria enable cows and the like to digest what is essentially indigestible (cellulose). But in the process they off-gas all that methane, which is 20 times more powerful by volume than carbon dioxide at trapping solar energy.

We could attempt to cap the number of flatulent ruminants in farm production as a means to cool global warming. This approach offers many fresh benefits—especially since meat and dairy are so insanely energy intensive, even without the farting. But if reduction never happens, we could still lower methane emissions via fish oil.

Or, better yet, flaxseed oil... can Doctor Lillis look into its omega-3 powers? If flaxseed works, then we don't have to rape the seas to feed the cows who eat the grain grown with fossil-fuel technologies only to fart the methane just so we can eat the cows and fart the methane from our meat-clogged digestive tracts... then maybe we'll all live happily ever after.

An innovative video from NotOnOurMenu.com, designed to get whomever eats the wretched and wretchedly expensive stuff to stop. Nearly 100,000 tons of shark fins were brought to market from all over the World Ocean in 2006. Most were destined for the shark-fin-soup capital of the world, Hong Kong. A tasteless bowl of the stuff, often seasoned with chicken broth, nevertheless costs $200 a pop. Recession can't come hard enough or fast enough to this line of business.

Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use of energy and materials. Overall new manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to 1 million times bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than traditional industries. Microchips use orders of magnitude more energy than manhole covers.

This according to a detailed MIT analysis of 20 major manufacturing processes. "The seemingly extravagant use of materials and energy resources by many newer manufacturing processes is alarming and needs to be addressed alongside claims of improved sustainability from products manufactured by these means," says Timothy Gutowski [pdf] of MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Manufacturers have traditionally been more concerned with price, quality, or cycle time, and not as concerned with energy use. That will change, though, when energy prices rise again and when/if a carbon tax is adopted.

Take solar panels. (Say it isn't so!) Their production uses some of the same manufacturing processes as microchips but on a larger scale. Plus their production is escalating dramatically. The inefficiency of current solar panel manufacturing drastically reduces the technology's lifecycle energy balance.

Translation: the ratio of energy the panel produces over its useful lifespan compared to the energy required to manufacture it sucks.

The good news is that this study published in Environmental Science & Technology is making the first important steps toward understanding which processes are most inefficient and which and need further research to develop less energy-intensive alternatives.

Example: many newer processes involve vapor-phase processing (e.g., material is vaporized in a vacuum chamber to make a coating). Depositing a coating from a liquid solution is better and could be developed to downsize the energy footprint.

The study covered everything from old fashioned industries like a cast-iron foundry all the way up to semiconductors and nanomaterials. It included injection molding, sputtering, carbon nanofiber production and dry etching, along with more traditional machining, milling, drilling and melting. (However, the researchers only looked at processes where electricity was the primary energy source, hence no analysis of pharmaceutical or petroleum industries.)

Plus the figures are inherently conservative since they don't include things like the energy required to make the materials themselves or the energy required to maintain the environment of the plant (air conditioning, filtration).

Gutowski's bottom line: new processes are huge users of materials and energy and have increased our energy and materials consumption by three to six orders of magnitude. The "claims that these technologies are going to save us in some way need closer scrutiny. There's a significant energy cost involved here [and] each of these processes could be improved."

Chinese-made drywall releases a rotten egg smell and might be corroding household wiring and causing health problems. It was installed throughout the Gulf Coast region in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as U.S.-made drywall became scare in the midst of the housing boom. One hundred and fifty homeowners have complained about drywall odors to the Florida Health Department; the large homebuilder, Lennar Corp., has been forced to rip out walls and is suing Chinese drywall companies; and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is investigating whether the drywall is posing a potential safety hazard. The Wall Street Journal, the only national paper that has covered the issue extensively, wonders if Chinese drywall is the "new mold." It's certainly the new toy or dog food, other Chinese product lines that have proven potentially dangerous and led to recalls. The drywall scare will compound the housing crisis by further burdening struggling builders and homeowners. And it points to the hollowness of the housing boom in the context of the global economy. Even our homes weren't made at home, and the housing boom has imported toxic assets to Main Street in more ways than one.

Earth Hour starts at 8:30 PM tomorrow. Yet as people around the world prepare to throw the switch to enlighten others about climate change, I'm mildly freaked about the prospect of the lights going out for good. New Scientist reports that NASA and the National Academies of Science are pretty concerned about giant solar plasma balls wiping out the world's power grids in an instant. And not just for an hour or two; we're talking months or years—or at least until someone figures out a way to make more electrical transformers without using electricity. (Read the full report here.) Such a "space weather Katrina," as the NAS helpfully describes it, could literally be the beginning of a new dark age. Oh, and of course, the next round of solar flare-ups is scheduled to start in—when else?— 2012.

I had the good fortune just over a year ago to travel with Oceanites researchers Ron Naveen and Heather Lynch to Antarctica aboard the National Geographic Endeavour;. My article talked about climate change and tourism and science. Here's a gorgeously-filmed update on Oceanites' findings from the front lines of climate change: the rapidly changing realm of ice and penguins.

There's no vaccination against climate change. And a lot of diseases are on the move because of it. So have you ever wondered how much our federal government spends on health research related to climate change? You know, all those problems coming our way—some already here—like heat-related mortality, diarrheal diseases, diseases associated with exposure to ozone and airborne allergens, plus all the health effects from altered air, water, agriculture, and ecosystems services. How about less than $3 million a year?

Kind of hard to believe. Multiply that number by 33 and you get the amount in bonuses AIG is planning to pay its executives for destroying their company. Bonuses paid for with federally funded bailout money.

A new study in Environmental Health Perspectives says that even though climate change will seriously impact public health, the US has yet to allocate anywhere near adequate funding to prepare for these impacts. So what's needed? A measly $200 million or so. Enough to shift research priorities at the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The report points out that funding research on the effects of climate change on human health is a wise investment, consistent with the goals of restoring economic stability, justice, environmental quality, and reducing healthcare costs. So can't we just beg, borrow, or print a little more money to do that?

A lawsuit accused the Department of Homeland Security of violating the National Environmental Policy Act regarding the now-delayed U.S. Border Patrol plans to conduct aerial spraying of an herbicide on carrizo (kah-DEE'-zoh) cane near the Rio Grande.

Residents of two Laredo neighborhoods on Tuesday sued DHS in a lawsuit which alleged the public wasn't sufficiently notified about the spraying program, the Laredo Morning Times reported in a story for Wednesday's editions.